OPINION
CARLOS
LOZADA
Give Me Liberty or Give Me … What?
April 21,
2024
Credit...Christopher
Anderson/Magnum Photos
Carlos Lozada
By Carlos Lozada
Opinion
Columnist
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/21/opinion/civil-war-liberty-america.html
If the
American experiment finally decides to call it quits, how might a national
breakup begin?
Perhaps
California moves toward secession after the U.S. Supreme Court strikes down the
state’s strict gun control measures. Or Texas rebels when disputes over
abortion laws grow deadly and the state’s National Guard remains loyal to the
second Texan republic. Or a skirmish over the closure of a local bridge by
federal inspectors escalates into a standoff between a beloved sheriff and a
famous general, and the rest of the country takes sides. Or it’s the
coordinated bombing of state capitols timed to the 2028 presidential
transition, with right-wing militias and left-wing activists blaming one
another.
In other
words: It’s not you, it’s me hating you.
These
scenarios are not of my own creation; they all appear in recent nonfiction
books warning of an American schism. The secessionist impulses take shape in
David French’s “Divided We Fall,” which cautions that Americans’ political and
cultural clustering risks tearing the country apart. (French published it
before becoming a Times columnist in 2023.) The statehouse explosions go off in
Barbara F. Walter’s “How Civil Wars Start,” which notes that when democratic
norms erode, opportunistic leaders can more easily aggravate the ethnic and
cultural divides that end in violence. The Battle of the Bridge is one of
several possible Sumter moments in Stephen Marche’s “The Next Civil War,” which
contends that our great divorce would flow from irreconcilable differences over
what America stands for.
These
authors offer examples of what could happen, not predictions of what will.
Their point is that our politics and culture are susceptible to such
possibilities. “The crisis has already arrived,” Marche writes. “Only the
inciting incidents are pending.”
It is
precisely the absence of inciting incidents that makes the writer-director Alex
Garland’s much-debated new film, “Civil War” (its box-office success resulting
in part from the multitude of newspaper columnists going to see it), such an
intriguing addition to this canon. We never learn exactly who or what started
the new American civil war, or what ideologies, if any, are competing for
power. It’s a disorienting and risky move, but an effective one. An elaborate
back story would distract from the viewer’s engagement with the war itself —
the bouts of despair and detachment, of death and denial — as lived and
chronicled by the weary journalists at the center of the story.
Even the
choice of journalists as the film’s protagonists creates an additional layer of
remove, especially because, weirdly, these journalists rarely discuss the
origins of the conflict or question its politics, even among themselves. (“We
record so other people ask,” a veteran photographer reminds her protégée.) The
story is built around their travels from New York to Washington, where they
hope to score one last presidential interview before the capital falls.
“Civil War”
is a road trip movie, if your trip occurs somewhere between the dislocation of
“Nomadland” and the dystopia of “The Road.” If you’re trying to see the
national monuments before they turn to rubble. If stopping for gas involves
Canadian currency and scenes of torture. If stadium camps and mass graves have
become standard features of America the beautiful.
Sign up for
the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert
analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every
weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.
In this
telling, California and Texas have both seceded and somehow allied together.
They are battling the remnants of the U.S. armed forces as well as some loyal
Secret Service agents and die-hard White House staffers, all of whom serve the
same purpose as the expendable ensigns on a “Star Trek” landing party. There is
also something called the Florida Alliance, which has been trying to persuade
the Carolinas to break away from Washington, too.
Listen to
‘Matter of Opinion’
Get more
analysis from Carlos Lozada and other Opinion writers in this new podcast from
New York Times Opinion.
Illustration
by The New York Times; Photograph by David Yeazell/USA Today Sports, via
Reuters Con
MATTER OF
OPINION AUDIO
Are We All
Authoritarians at Heart?
42 MIN
LISTEN
But the
most memorable fighters in this war are the informal militias found across the
country, whose motives for violence range from self-defense to self-indulgence.
One fighter explains, with an annoyed air, why he’s taking aim at a sniper:
“Someone’s trying to kill us. We are trying to kill them.” Another exudes
slow-motion glee while executing his uniformed, hooded prisoners. Another
militant mumbles that he’s strung up a local looter in part because the guy had
ignored him in high school, a casual malevolence that brought to mind Shad
Ledue, the murderous handyman from Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel, “It Can’t
Happen Here.” Once Ledue gains a little power — just enough — over his kindly
but oblivious former employers, his enduring resentment fuels his vengeance.
Civil
conflicts are sustained by different groups’ belief that their “position and
status in society” have been downgraded, Walter writes. Whether that erosion is
real can be less relevant than the feelings of oppression and loss, and the
chance to blame and punish someone for it. Once the door has opened just a
crack, high school slights and condescending bosses become good excuses —
precisely because they’re so petty — for violence.
The power
of “Civil War” is that the snippets of context deepen the film’s ambiguity, as
well as its realism. The president, we learn in passing, is serving a third
term, and the action begins with him rehearsing his lies before addressing the
nation. (So was secession a reaction to an authoritarian leader, or was his
extended tenure itself a response to regional rebellion?) The president made
controversial decisions, like deploying airstrikes against U.S. citizens (a
plot point that reminded me of the U.S. killing of the radical cleric Anwar
al-Awlaki in 2011) and disbanding the F.B.I. (which evoked the fateful U.S.
decision to dissolve the Iraqi military in 2003). The war photographer at the
heart of the movie, played by Kirsten Dunst, gained fame in college for
snapping a “legendary” photo of something called the Antifa Massacre. (I
immediately thought of the indelible Kent State photograph from 1970, also
taken by a collegiate photographer, though whether this new massacre was
supposedly perpetrated by or against Antifa activists is unclear.)
“Civil War”
is not ripped from the headlines as much as it is stitched from history; it is
not a vision of what might happen in America but a collage of what already has
happened, some here and much elsewhere.
In that
sense, the film is reminiscent of Omar El Akkad’s 2017 novel “American War,”
which imagines a new civil conflict late in the 21st century, after climate
change has remade the country and a federal prohibition on the use of fossil
fuels prompts an uprising by Americans clinging to their guns and gas guzzlers.
El Akkad, a journalist who has covered terrorism, military tribunals and mass
migration around the world, decides to put them all in one place, a future
America where principle has given way to retribution. “This isn’t only about
secession anymore,” someone explains after the fighting begins. “This is about
avenging our dead.” It’s a book-length rebuttal of American exceptionalism.
“Civil War”
issues a similar rebuttal in a lament by Dunst’s character, who struggles with
flashbacks from the many conflicts she’s covered and also can’t quite accept
that it’s happening here. “Every time I survived a war zone and got the photo,”
she says, “I thought I was sending a warning home: Don’t do this. But here we
are.”
The missing
back story in “Civil War” does not obviate any consideration of how such a war
could have begun; it forces viewers to realize that many different roads could
get us there. We don’t have to be the United States from the 1850s or the
Balkans from the 1990s; we can choose our own misadventure.
Of course,
not everyone chooses sides. Political violence does not necessarily depend on
mass mobilization but on just the right mix of minority zealotry and majority
indifference, or perhaps fear. In “Civil War,” the journalists come upon a time
warp of a town, sprinklers still spraying and shops still open, seemingly
insulated from the mayhem. One resident explains that she sees the war on
television but would rather just “stay out.” The coexistence of brutality and
normality is a recurring feature of war, and I can picture many Americans
getting through an actual civil war with similar distance. (Maybe they’d call
it self-care.) But I suspect that more than enough of us would feel what Marche
calls “the pleasure of contempt.” That pleasure is everywhere in “Civil War,”
no less than in the Abu Ghraib-style photo that slowly develops in the closing
credits.
In “How
Civil Wars Start,” Walter points to the breakdown of a unified national
identity as a precursor of strife. In Iraq, she writes, people began to ask who
was Shiite and who Sunni; in Bosnia, the distinction among Serb, Croat and
Muslim identities overpowered all else. One of the most disturbing moments in
“Civil War” shows a camouflage-clad fighter threatening the journalists. When
they insist they are Americans, he asks, “What kind of American are you?” At
gunpoint, they answer, and the fatal exchange shows that the definition of
America is no longer found in the creed of liberty, equality and opportunity
but in the sludge of blood, soil and language.
The quest
for a cohesive national definition comes up in these recent books warning of
our deepening divides. Walter compares the political tensions of our time to
the 1850s and the 1960s. “Both times, the country’s political parties had
radically different visions of America’s future. What could the country be?
What should the country be?” She hopes that America’s enduring ideals and
shared history can inspire us to “fulfill the promise of a truly multiethnic
democracy.” In “Divided We Fall,” French imagines but does not expect that we
might draw on our federalist tradition to let different states live as they
choose while preserving individual rights, not to mention the union.
Such
outcomes would require the acceptance of those shared ideals and history, a
semblance of consensus around what kind of country we want to be. This is
harder in an America of proliferating identities and symbols, a country where
group rights and grievances risk trumping the commonalities and compromises
that bind us together. “Identity-based parties make it impossible for voters to
switch sides,” Walter writes. “There is nowhere for them to go if their
political identity is tied to their ethnic or religious identity.”
Marche
hopes that America will regain its swagger and reinvent its politics, but the
estrangement he sees offers little encouragement. “Each side accuses the other
of hating America,” he writes, “which is only another way of saying that both
hate what the other means by America.”
The debate
over what kind of America we want is vital and unceasing. But when it shifts
from the universal to the personal, from what kind of America we want to what
kind of American we’ll accept, then we have moved from conversation to
interrogation, from inquiry to tragedy. You don’t have to believe that a new
civil war is coming to understand the dangers of the question — “What kind of
American are you?” — and to realize that the more answers we grasp for, the
weaker we become.
The Times
is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to
hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And
here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.
Follow the
New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, X and
Threads.
Carlos
Lozada is an Opinion columnist and a co-host of the weekly “Matter of Opinion”
podcast for The Times, based in Washington, D.C. He is the author, most
recently, of “The Washington Book: How to Read Politics and Politicians.” @CarlosNYT
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário